Nathaniel Schooler 0:23

Today we are discussing content marketing and social media. I'm interviewing Ehsan Khodarahmi, he has worked for over six years for brands such as Sky and Samsung before making a brave move in 2015 to become an independent digital marketing consultant.

In addition to his professional work Ehsan is passionate about education and writing has written his own book, it's actually called Character 100% Character. It's available on Amazon as well. He's actually written over 60 articles published by the Huffington Post on LinkedIn and Social Media Expert. The British Chamber of Commerce, University of Westminster, Michigan State University and Miami University use Ehsan's publications as reference material. He is a humble man and lives his life based on his own very simple philosophy. Say what you mean mean what you say, you can always reach out to Ehsan on twitter at @eksays. Let's get into the show. Hey, Ehsan. It's really nice to talk with you again.

Ehsan Khodarahmi 1:30

Thank you very much for having me

Nathaniel Schooler 1:32

You know, I love content marketing, I'm right into writing content and doing podcasts and the occasional video and sort of stuff like this. But in terms of sort of content marketing, the most important thing is.... Well, two things right, is to build the audience obviously, and obviously get the audience to do something to take some sort of action. So what are the best ways to build an audience in terms of content marketing?

Ehsan Khodarahmi 2:02

First of all, we need to define our objectives, what we want to achieve from content marketing, if we are going to sell through content marketing, we need to be absolutely clear and have right KPIs in place. But content marketing is more about storytelling, it is more about educating and informing our audience about our purpose.

So we need to be able to track and we need to be able to interact with our audience. Not just dropping links everywhere, writing blog posts, writing articles. I don't know paying ghost writers to do that for us, or we do it internally at and these are all great.

But what we want to achieve and how effective that is. So the effort we are going to put into creating content, we need to step back for a second and define our objectives. So this is the starting point for creating meaningful content.

Nathaniel Schooler 3:09

What what sort of objectives are you referring to? Exactly?

Ehsan Khodarahmi 3:14

Corporate objectives, business objectives, how relevant we are to our audience, in what market you're operating?

And what sort of content our audience would like to see?

Are we writing to sell our products and services? So that is not content marketing! Or are we writing to engage and educate the market about our innovative products, great services?

How are we going to differentiate ourselves? These are the kind of objectives we need to have in mind, we need we need to have KPIs that impact on SEO, the level of web traffic we get.

Social engagement and of course, a and of the day sales leads, do we get inquiries?

Do we get people coming to us asking us questions?

So these are the kinds of objectives we need to define based on that grant, create the right content, right, and use the right channel to do the distribution.

Of course, we need to familiarise ourselves with attribution model in terms of what content drives the most traffic?

What content is more engaging?

What does our audience our community actually, like the most?

Bring us the most business if you like?

Nathaniel Schooler 4:34

Measuring the effectiveness of content marketing, how how do we actually do that then?

Ehsan Khodarahmi 4:40

Again, I'll have to go back to our conversation just a second ago, by defining our purpose and objectives, what do we want to achieve?

So we need to define our objectives, whatever that is KPIs, if it is reach, if it is a sales leads, if it is web traffic, what is it?